Swedish Klarna is now a major global player in retail financing, especially digital, by offering installment solutions to merchants’ customers. To further strengthen its position, it recently acquired the Swedish search engine PriceRunner for 108 million euros in a transaction involving cash and shares of Klarna.
PriceRunner hosts at its base 3.4 million products from 22,500 eshops in 25 European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK and had revenues of 46 million euros last September.
Klarna offers payment and purchase financing solutions to merchants, was founded in 2005 in Stockholm by Sebastian Siemiatkowski (central photo) and is currently a global player in Fintech with over 1 billion euros revenues in 2020 with 90 million customers and 250,000 medium and large retail companies such as Nike, H&M, IKEA, Samsung, ASOS etc. while it already operates in 17 countries of Europe with 4,000 executives.
The acquisition is part of Klarna’s effort to integrate into all aspects of the so-called consumer shopping journey, from inspiration and product selection to flexible payments and delivery as well as returns, offering a complete experience to its customers.
Prior to the acquisition of PriceRunner, Klarna had acquired social shopping platform Hero, the German shopping app Stocard, the influencers platform APPRL and the travel site Inspirock.
“At Klarna we are constantly striving to make banking and the payment experience the best it can be, empowering consumers from discovering products to paying in a way that suits them.The acquisition will serve to strengthen our banking, cards and payment services and support a competitive global landscape. It also further establishes that Klarna will not just be a marketplace, but a viable and competitive alternative for retail partners compared to Amazon, Google and Facebook.” said David Fock, Klarna’s head of products.